This president is either engaged in a massive cover-up deceiving the American people or he is so grossly incompetent that he is not qualified to be the commander in chief of our armed forces. It’s either one of them.

“What Obama should do is say he’s going to veto any change to the end of the expiration of the Bush era tax cuts for everybody, and I feel very strongly about the everybody because you don’t want to split the country — that’s not what America is all about,” said Bloomberg.

“Obama would win this election going away if he’d stand up and say, ‘I’m gonna do this,’ and then turn to Republicans and say, ‘You know, you didn’t want any more revenues … I just outfoxed you. Now work with me on cutting expenses, and we’ll actually balance the budget in 10 years, and we’ll do it responsibly.'”

Bloomberg here reminds me a bit of Walter Mondale, who thought it was utter genius to declare in his 1984 acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention that he would raise taxes (Newt Gingrich, who was part of a Republican rapid response team during that convention, has noted that his group decided to pack up and go home after Mondale’s declaration, figuring they couldn’t damage him any worse than he had himself). Mondale’s theory was that both he and Reagan would end up hiking taxes, but that voters would give him points for being honest about it (for a thorough understanding of the truth of Reagan’s tax record, by the way, this Matt Lewis piece is indispensable). Later, after losing 49 states in the Electoral College, he probably thought better of that.

Here’s the foundational error in both cases: the tax argument is about substance, not style. Mondale thought he’d be rewarded for being honest about the fact that he was going to take more money away from the American people. But we don’t generally reward honesty when it’s a truthful admission of nefarious intent. Similarly, Bloomberg seems to think that “unity” is more important than tax rates, and that the American people will reward Obama if he makes clear that he’s going to put the screws to all of them with equal force. But, to paraphrase Obama from 2008, no one much cares what shade of lipstick you apply to a pig. The equal distribution of suffering is not a compelling campaign rationale (although it might be the most honest slogan Obama could devise).

There’s another irony at work here, of course: if Bloomberg thinks that tax rates should be harmonized in order to avoid “splitting the country,” the most logical step he could take would be to promote a flat tax. But that probably wouldn’t fly at the open-bar receptions of the Upper East Side.

Consider Andrew Malcolm’s take on what casino magnate and Gingrich Super PAC funder Sheldon Adelson is really up to with his new $10 million bet on Newt:

…Gingrich and Santorum are splitting the same crowd. And this benefits Romney, who has his own money and national operation carefully-constructed over years.

So, in this case, the adage about following the money would steer you in the wrong direction. The potential $21 million is really a bank shot for Adelson, going to help Gingrich prevent Santorum from beating Romney.

We’ll see if it works. But pretty clever.

Recall that Adelson was previously reported to have told Romney’s camp that if Mitt won the GOP nomination, Adelson would be even more generous than he was to Newt. Maybe the $10 million is a down payment on that promise.

In my commentary last week — focusing on the economic weaknesses of the Republican presidential candidates — I spent some time looking at Newt Gingrich’s enthusiasm for various energy subsidies, a pathology that he’s shared with much of the bipartisan establishment of the last decade or so. I noted in conclusion:

The Speaker is smart enough to know that the virtues of a free market apply to the energy industry just as much as any other. Fuel markets work best when consumers are making decisions based on price and quality, not when politicians are hand-picking energy sources to please favored constituencies.

This is just as true of conventional fuel sources like coal and oil as it is of boutique alternatives like hydrogen, wind, or solar. And it’s just as true whether it’s Democrats or Republicans giving the handouts. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see a group of Tea Party conservatives on Capitol Hill attempting to strip the crony capitalism from the energy industry. As Timothy P. Carney reports in the Washington Examiner:

Freshmen Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas has proposed the loftily titled “Energy Freedom and Economic Prosperity Act,” while the Senate’s Tea Party heroes, Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Mike Lee (Utah), have introduced the companion bill in the upper chamber.

The bill, which Pompeo hopes to insert into legislation extending the payroll-tax credit, would take a huge bite out of energy subsidies by eliminating tax credits for everything from solar panels and wind turbines to oil drilling and nuclear power generation. At the same time, the measure would cut tax rates.

…”This is the model,” Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist told me Friday. It gets rid of the hodgepodge of distorting credits that steer money away from productive energy investments and toward politically favored activities, and it also lowers everyone’s rates. Neutral, low taxes, conservatives have long argued, are the formula for prosperity and economic growth, not to mention fairness.

On this, Norquist is precisely right. By taking the federal government’s hand off the scales, this bill would allow energy providers to flourish or falter on the merits, rather than according to the size of their lobbying budgets. And by lowering tax rates, it would ensure that providing Americans with the energy they rely on to do everything from heating their homes to driving their cars would be both more profitable for producers and more affordable for consumers.

Pompeo is to be saluted for his courage. Now it falls to the American people to push for this bill’s passage. A wide array of energy industry lobbyists will be hell-bent on killing it. That’s just one more testimony in its favor.

Thanks to Politico, I came across this open letter to Newt Gingrich from Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips. Phillips, a Gingrich supporter since last fall, thinks Newt’s Florida primary loss to Romney can be explained by a damning lack of organization:

Your campaign is sinking faster than an Italian Cruise ship. I don’t know if anyone is telling you what is going on in your campaign but right now it is a disaster.

Last week, I was in Florida with the Tea Party Express tour. At the events, other campaigns had surrogates. By default, I became yours. I did not mind, but your campaign should have had someone there. While I was at the events in Florida, Romney supporters were there with signs, Ron Paul supporters with signs and Rick Santorum supporters with signs. Your supporters were there. They asked me for signs.

Because there was no one from your campaign attending, there were no signs to give.

Remember, Newt has been a congressman and a consultant, not a CEO. He resigned his speakership under after a failed coup. His network of business ventures are built around getting people to imagine fundamental changes that win the future. I’m a fan of some of his ideas, and I envy his ability to frame an issue around core conservative themes. That said, if a presidential campaign operation is any indication of how well a candidate manages an important enterprise, I’m afraid we’re left to conclude that Newt Gingrich is not up the job of running the White House, let alone a campaign against Barack Obama.

Writing today in Politico, Reagan biographer (and now Newt Gingrich chronicler) Craig Shirley gets to the very heart of the difficulty Mitt Romney faces in trying to persuade a Republican electorate desperate for an epochal shift in a party that they (rightly) perceive to have been insufficiently inattentive to limited government:

The former Bain Capital chief is the elitist heir to Rockefeller and the malapropistic heir to Ford and George H. W. Bush. Watching Ford speak extemporaneously was like watching a drunk cross an icy parking lot — and the same can be said for the exuberantly monosyllabic man from Massachusetts…

No one goes around calling themselves a Nixon Republican or a Ford Republican or a Bush Republican. But plenty now proudly call themselves Goldwater Republicans and Reagan Republicans.

One need not share Shirley’s enthusiasm for Gingrich to recognize the sagacity of his diagnosis of Romney. It’s not that conservatives don’t want a manager. It’s just that they want so much more. At this moment in our history — when all sense of principled restrictions on the power of the federal government seem to be eroding — they want someone to draw a line in the sand. Convincing conservative voters that he’s the man for that job is probably beyond Mitt Romney’s ability. To remain a serious candidate, however, he’ll at least have to convince them that he’s not a closet sympathist for their ideological adversaries within the party.

Increasingly desperate, Newt Gingrich has hurled a spaghetti bowl of slurs against Mitt Romney in the hope that something will stick. Curiously, one strand includes the following quote to a South Carolina audience: “Why would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama?”

That illogic, however, could have just as easily been used against Ronald Reagan in 1980 by his own Republican opponents. After all, Reagan lost the 1976 Republican nomination race to Gerald Ford, who obviously went on to lose to Carter. “Why,” they might have asked, “would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Jimmy Carter?” At this point, Newt’s attacks resemble a food fight more than principled defense of his own candidacy.

Regular readers know that I’m far from the biggest Mitt Romney supporter in the world. That being said, the criticisms of his time at Bain Capital leveled by fellow candidates Newt Gingrich, Jon Hunstman, and Rick Perry have been shockingly opportunistic and intellectually dishonest, particularly for self-proclaimed advocates of free market capitalism (they’ve also ignored the more salient criticism — the numerous instances in which Bain lived off the taxpayer).

Over at Ricochet, I have a proposed rhetorical response for Romney. The whole’s thing here, but here’s a sample:

I would remind my opponents – as I would remind President Obama – that work is a form of public service. Our ability to make money is directly tied to our ability to provide something of value to our fellow man. But sometimes when the customer’s needs change or when we lose ground to our competitors, we have to make changes. We don’t choose these circumstances. As a matter of fact, we hate these circumstances. But, like many Americans that are struggling today, we accept the things that we cannot change, we make the hard choices, and we persevere. That is never an easy task. And unfortunately, sometimes people lose their jobs as a result. But what, I wonder, do my opponents think the alternative is? If a company on the brink of failure has no choice but to let a few employees go now or to see all of their jobs disappear eventually, what should they do?

Those are the kind of painful choices that people face in the real economy. And I find it telling that that concept is foreign to my opponents. They’re not foreign to the American people – because they’re living through them every day. You can talk to anyone who’s ever sat behind a manager’s desk – whether it’s in a corner office or a corner store – and they’ll tell you that there’s nothing that they hate more than having to fire someone. Americans take pride in their work. Losing a paycheck hurts. But losing your sense of dignity hurts more. My experiences in business didn’t make me enjoy firing people. It made me loathe the politicians in Washington for whom those people are nothing more than statistics on a spreadsheet.

It’s probably true that there are really three GOP contests in Iowa right now. Ron Paul’s libertarian caucus, the establishment caucus between Newt Gingrich and Romney, and the conservative caucus between Santorum, Bachmann, and Rick Perry. Unless Paul wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s likely done after next week’s voting. (But what if he did win both?) A Romney win in Iowa probably knocks out Gingrich, with whomever survives to win the conservative caucus having an uphill climb against a strengthened Romney.

Because of his record and light campaigning in the state, Romney wasn’t supposed to win Iowa. If he does, his march to the nomination may be a short one.

Newt’s due a little holiday cheer then, and it comes in the form of Thomas Sowell’s new column, which essentially provides an endorsement from one of conservatism’s leading intellectuals. Sowell begins with the premise I expressed in an October column. I wrote at the time:

It represents a healthy political idealism for Republicans to search for the second coming of Ronald Reagan. But it’s a bit tiresome when they become inconsolable at his absence. Reagan was of a class alone, not only in his combination of political skills and ideological bearings, but also in the way that his abilities uniquely met his moment in history. Cursing the whole enterprise just because you can’t find his carbon copy is akin to writing off a Super Bowl win because you didn’t have a perfect season.

Sowell applies this principle to the Gingrich candidacy:

Do we wish we had another Ronald Reagan? We could certainly use one. But we have to play the hand we were dealt. And the Reagan card is not in the deck.

While the televised debates are what gave Newt Gingrich’s candidacy a big boost, concrete accomplishments when in office are the real test. Gingrich engineered the first Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 40 years — followed by the first balanced budget in 40 years. The media called it “the Clinton surplus” but all spending bills start in the House of Representatives, and Gingrich was Speaker of the House.

Speaker Gingrich also produced some long overdue welfare reforms, despite howls from liberals that the poor would be devastated. But nobody makes that claim any more.

Did Gingrich ruffle some feathers when he was Speaker of the House? Yes, enough for it to cost him that position. But he also showed that he could produce results.

In a world where we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available, the question is whether Newt Gingrich is better than Barack Obama — and better than Mitt Romney.

Sowell is certainly an outlier amongst the right-leaning intelligentsia. The question now is whether he’ll also be in the minority when it comes time to vote.

Another reason Gingrich isn’t fading is Mitt Romney. Let’s face it: Mitt Romney is the Republican version of Al Gore. Even people who are predisposed to liking him can’t seem to get there. Romney is supposedly more electable than Gingrich, at least according to the Inside the Beltway crowd and the major media.

Really? Liberal pollster Peter Hart’s focus group, asked to pick a family relationship to Romney, labeled him “black sheep,” “fun neighbor,” “cousin,” “second cousin,” “dad that was never home.” The same group labeled Gingrich “grandfather,” “father,” “my favorite uncle,” and “uncle who keeps bringing home different wives.” Is grandpa less electable than the dad who was never home?

Labeling Romney a black sheep and the GOP version of Al Gore really crystallizes his failure to excite Republican primary voters, doesn’t it? The most devastating part of these analogies is that they manage to be accurate without being overly negative or hurtful (unless you factor in political pain).

It is not necessary, but oh so fitting that the week ends with news that GOP presidential candidates Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann will not be attending the December 27th debate “moderated” by Donald Trump in Des Moines, IA. After a spirited exchange with Quin and Troy, I’m glad to see my musings about a Lincoln-Douglas style debate between Gingrich and Santorum taking a turn toward reality. With other candidates Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Jon Huntsman already declining – and Herman Cain out of the race – that leaves Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich as the only participants in what could be a decisive event one week before Iowa Republicans caucus to pick a presidential nominee.

Perhaps the twists and turns in this wacky pre-primary season aren’t done just yet. Next up: Santorum publicly challenging Newt to a one-on-one debate over the past, present, and future of America. Something tells me it’s the kind of challenge a ‘world historical figure’ like Gingrich won’t pass up.

Nobody in print (or cyberprint) has been as relentlessly and factually brutal against Newt Gingrich than Wash Post conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin. The key thing is, she keeps digging up actual facts, evidence, history. Not a lot of extraneous opinion. Here’s her latest, on Newtonian ethics. One always wonders how the alchemy works that turns facts into information that actually sways public opinion. But it’s clear that unless the facts are published, there’s no chance for them to be absorbed. Indefatigable reporting like this merits applause.

I’m not sure whether my title line sounds more like a disreputable law firm or an unpublished fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Anyway …

There are a lot of good points flying around these discussions. Let me hit on a couple of things in Ashton’s post from earlier today.

He’s certainly right that Santorum may get an unexpected star turn during the NewsMax debate moderated by Donald Trump later this month. Like Ashton, I find the whole affair unsavory (a point I’ve been making over at Ricochet, though I’ve been getting significant pushback there), but I find Santorum’s decision to participate much more reasonable than Newt’s. The former is in such dire need of a Hail Mary pass that he can’t let quibbles with the format keep him from one last shot at a broad swath of the electorate. Newt, whose surge is continuing unabated, doesn’t need the exposure — and his participation is at odds with his repeated insistence that he’s the Serious candidate in the race.

One final note regarding Huntsman, whom Ashton mentioned in passing. As the anti-Newt campaign has developed legs in recent weeks (particularly with the Republican establishment in Washington), there has been yet another search for a conservative alternative, which has led some pundits (including the esteemed George Will) to posit that Huntsman deserves another look. Their rationale? That the former Utah governor has been the most consistently conservative candidate in the field — both in rhetoric and in record — on taxes, guns, and abortion.

This is another example of the principle I keep coming back to as we discuss presidential candidates: having the right positions on paper is necessary, but not sufficient. Huntsman may be good on a handful of issues, but his campaign has been weighed down by the fact that he consistently picks fights with the conservative base, often over superfluous issues (did we really need another election year argument over evolution? Has there ever been a significant presidential decision that hinged on that debate?). He’s the guy who comes back from a stint as Ambassador to China to tell us how bad we look overseas. He’s the guy who tells the Republican Party how primitive it is. And the primary he’d most like to win is with the media.

Why hasn’t Huntsman taken off? Because the only time he communicates with conservatives is to tell them how ashamed of them he is.

Troy, your analysis of Santorum’s weaknesses as a debater is well taken. You’re also correct to draw out the positive of having so many presidential debates: it allows second tier candidates to make a mark in the public’s consciousness with well-delivered messages whenever the moderator gives them 15 seconds to speak. Unlike Gingrich and Cain (and arguably Huntsman), Santorum has not made the most of his limited opportunities at these forums.

But that might change with the growing boycott of Donald Trump’s Newsmax debate. So far, only Gingrich and Santorum have confirmed their attendance at the debate on December 27th in Des Moines, IA. With Huntsman, Ron Paul, and as of yesterday Mitt Romney (rightly) calling the Trump-as-moderator idea a distracting publicity stunt – and Michele Bachmann leaning towards declining the invitation because she correctly points out that Trump is considering a third party bid – it means that Rick Perry is the only major candidate yet to decide. If he bows out, then the debate in Des Moines will feature a Newt v. Santorum one-off exactly one week before the Iowa caucuses.

Despite all his miscues in the debates so far, Santorum would be face-to-face with the current GOP frontrunner seven days before Iowa Republicans – a state party dominated by grassroots conservatives – goes to the polls. If this unique opportunity comes to pass and Santorum still can’t master the sound bite, he should demand a Lincoln-Douglas style debate with Newt on who has the most compelling conservative vision for America. That means Trump would effectively become a timekeeper while arguably the two biggest conservative reformers of the 1990’s go at it to prove their base bona fides. (And if Trump can’t handle not being the star of the show, this gives Newsmax an excellent reason to let him bow out. Besides, his participation has already cost them ratings with the refusals of several big name candidates. As a parting gift, they could let The Donald hock his new book during commercial breaks.)

Both Santorum and Newt have thought seriously about the issues confronting the country, and this format would give them each the opportunity to demonstrate their seriousness to a national audience. And, with the slow news cycle during the Christmas break providing the perfect opening for sustained attention to the debate before and after, the uniqueness of the event would no doubt increase viewership and water cooler talk.

It’s true that Santorum seemingly needs a miracle where all of the major candidates take themselves off the stage and allow him a one-time shot to prove to conservatives that he is a better Mr. Right than Newt Gingrich. That seems to be happening with every new debate decline.

Ashton and Quin posit some ideas below for why former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (a man I admire) hasn’t become a significant candidate in the Republican presidential field. Let me tackle a few of these suppositions and then explain why I think Santorum’s campaign is in the basement — and why it will stay there.

Ashton wonders if the media has an aversion to Santorum because of his stances on social issues. I doubt it. Mike Huckabee was the social conservative candidate du jour in 2008 and he got plenty of press coverage. The fact that the media mandarins are often unsympathetic to people of faith doesn’t keep them from covering religious candidates– it usually just means they’ll cover them with scorn. It’s been 25 years since Pat Robertson ran for president and the press is still taking their shots at him

Quin is correct to note that Santorum consistently shows a very strong grasp of the issues in debates. He’s also correct to note that the former senator gets very little camera time at these forums. That latter fact, however, doesn’t explain Santorum’s failure to catch on. The time a candidate gets in a debate is a lagging indicator of his relevancy, not a leading one. Herman Cain didn’t get much attention in early debates either, but he maximized what time he had and his performances led to his rise in the polls. The same was true of Newt Gingrich early on. Ditto Huckabee in 2008. If a second-tier candidate wants to get into the first tier, he has to know how to exploit the few openings that come his way. Santorum doesn’t.

Like Quin, I don’t put much stock in the argument about Santorum as a loser because of his performance in the 2006 Pennsylvania senate race. Those are calculations that are primarily made by beltway types for beltway types.

Of all the diagnoses, I think Quin’s point about Santorum’s failure to win style points in the debates is closest to the mark, though I would take it much farther. Santorum actively hurts himself in these forums. He has a seemingly unshakable tendency to come off petulant, complaining about how much time he gets and boasting about his congressional record in a manner so ostentatiously self-regarding as to be off-putting.

It’s also important to remember that “style points” matter (just ask Rick Perry). Style, particularly in the way you communicate, is one of the major levers of presidential power, though it’s not always sufficient (just ask Barack Obama). Santorum conveys no personal warmth, humor, or sense of personality whatsoever. He seems just as bland as Tim Pawlenty once did behind the podium.

That may seem like a superficial standard by which to judge a possible president, but it’s one of the standards we use (it’s a lot less operative at other levels, including the senate, which is why Santorum hasn’t had this problem before). Americans have an emotional attachment to the presidency and they’re always implicitly asking themselves “Is this the person I want in my living room for four years? Is this the person I want to rally behind in a time of crisis?” Unless and until Santorum can figure out how to convince voters to answer those questions in the affirmative, he’ll remain mired in the single digits.

Though there are many positive things to say about Rick Santorum’s candidacy – battle-tested conservative on national security, welfare reform and foundational issues like family and marriage – he has yet to catch anything resembling a break while seemingly every other Republican running for president has (witness the regrettable Jon Huntsman ticking up in New Hampshire).

Unlike frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum has no personal baggage, and has not flip-flopped on any principled issue since entering public life twenty years ago. As we’ve discussed before, Santorum has great ideas on personal and corporate tax reform that would lead to real economic growth. So, with the base refusing to support Mitt Romney and others skittish of Newt Gingrich’s past and future, why can’t Rick get a break? Is it media bias over his stance on social issues? Bad debate performances? Does he lack contacts with big donors?